


you'll see the beauty of tuesday afternoon

by bucketofrice



Category: Figure Skating RPF, Olympics RPF
Genre: 4 Things, F/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, this is in parts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 19:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15274467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bucketofrice/pseuds/bucketofrice
Summary: "We don't do presents. It's kind of nice to do a random Tuesday 'thought of you,' y'know, card or something."orFour Tuesday letters, from Scott to Tessa.





	you'll see the beauty of tuesday afternoon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fairwinds09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairwinds09/gifts).



> Scott Moir is a walking romcom and the literal embodiment of the heart eyes emoji. This sappy mess is the result of that.
> 
> (Also, I needed to honour my username and actually write the damn bucket of rice story.)
> 
> Title is from "Tuesday Afternoon" by The Moody Blues.

**_i. photograph_ **

It’s a Tuesday in November when he stands by the boards, waiting with clammy hands and a small note. It’s enclosed in a crisp white envelope, and he worries that he’s smudging the ink at the front, in the space where he wrote her name out in his neatest grade-school-cursive scrawl.

Inside is his newest school picture, the cool one with the shirt that has the big Nike swoosh. It’s a hand-me-down from Danny, sure, but it’s still _cool_ and Scott likes to think it makes him look a bit older somehow.

He’s also written a note, with his mother’s help, a real one on a proper card. His mom said that he needed to be extra careful writing on the paper, to not smudge the pen, and he’d nearly held his breath throughout the entirety of it (he needed air when he got to the last line, but that’s got to stay a secret, because he’d told Charlie afterward that he’d held his breath for _five_ whole minutes straight. And he’s pretty sure his brother had believed him. _He hadn’t._ ).

The writing came out a little slanted, and he used a bit of artistic license with the capitalization, but overall, he considers it a success:

_Tessa_

_here is my picture._

_To The Best Partner_

_EVER, Love, Scott._

Now, he’s just waiting for her to get there, so he can give her the picture and get this whole thing over with. He has skating to practice and hockey to play and he’s not about to admit that a big part of him is nervous right now.

His stomach feels like it does before he and Tessa show off their programs at the rink, all fuzzy and fluttery and not so good. He wonders if Tessa will like the picture, and the note, and whether his teeth look too big for his face. He wonders and worries and shifts his weight from one foot to another, bouncing side to side because he’s restless.

“Scott?” 

He looks up when he hears her voice, ringing through the rink like a silver bell. She’s got her mittens on again — the ones that make Danny call her _big hands_ — and he wonders if she’ll be able to open the envelope with them on. He gets so caught up in his own thoughts that he doesn’t notice her tipping her head to the side and eyeing him with a signature Tessa Virtue stare. 

Even at the tender age of eight, she’s got a pout down pat.

“Scott?” she repeats, a tinge of annoyance in her tone.

He looks up, finally, his cheeks turning pink. “I have something for you,” he says, his tone sheepish. “My mom said…” _way to bring up your mom, Moir,_ “Well, actually, _I_ thought that you might like to have my picture. To remember me when we’re not at the rink, you know?”

He holds the envelope out like it’s about to catch fire, his arm stiff as a board.

Tessa’s eyes go wide, but she takes it, carefully balancing it in the crook of her arm as she removes one giant mitten. She opens it gingerly and pulls out the picture first, then the note.

Scott stares at the floor with determined concentration.

“Thank you, Scott.” He looks up and she’s smiling, and he lets out a relieved breath. She likes it.

He grins, and she blushes, and stashes the note in her skate bag. _For safekeeping, Scott._

When they’re out on the ice fifteen minutes later, doing warmup laps around the rink, she turns to him as they’re rounding a corner.

“Did you really think I was going to forget your face when I see you three times a week?”

He blushes. He really didn’t think this one through.

Tessa giggles, her eyes crinkling. “That was a _joke_ ,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Thank you for the picture. It was very nice of you.”

“You’re welcome, Tutu. Race you?”

**_ii. rice_ **

He’s standing in a supermarket aisle, trying to calculate weights and averages and volumes and quantities, staring at the seemingly never-ending varieties of rice on the shelves.

_Long-grain, short-grain, brown, white, basmati, sprouted, wild rice…_

All the names are blurring together into one big mess in his head and he has to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose to stop himself from going crazy. He just needs rice, period, probably the cheapest kind, because who’s gonna eat rice when it once sat in a bucket anyway.

He squats down to reach the bottom shelf, deciding on a ten-pound bag of plain white rice. It’s the least expensive, and it comes in bulk, and it’s sure to do the job.

His next stop is the gardening aisle, where he stares at one clay pot and bright yellow bucket after another. None of them quite fit the bill: they’re either too small, or too large, or the wrong colour. He’s after something very specific, he knows that much.

But he doesn’t quite know what he’s looking for.

A sales clerk approaches him — a nice looking woman in her late fifties — and gives him a warm smile. “Can I help you find anything today?”

“Oh, I’m looking for a bucket for my rice,” he says, an offhand comment, his eyes still scanning the shelves. He doesn’t realize how strange it must sound till a few seconds later, when he sees the woman’s eyes go wide.

He turns to her, properly now, and it hits him a bit too late that he must look a bit odd, standing there with a giant bag of rice in his hands, in the aisle of a Kroger, in the middle of Canton, on a Tuesday in early March.

“It’s for a gift, for my skating partner,” he adds, realizing as the words leave his mouth that they really don’t make much more sense than the ones before. “I’m sorry,” he tacks on for good measure, “I’m sure I’ll find something for her eventually.”

The clerk — Debbie, he reads off the tag on her apron — gives him a kind smile. She must see how tired he looks, because they’re in the last weeks of training and it’s hell and Marina isn’t giving them any leeway to breathe.

“Now son,” she starts, “she must be a lovely girl, if you care so much about getting her the right thing. Tell me what you’re trying to give her, and maybe I can help.”

So he does, he tells Debbie at Kroger about Marnie McBean and ice dancing and Tessa and the fact that they’ll be in Nice in a few short weeks but they’re scared out of their minds. And that Tessa’s been pushing herself so hard, and that he’s so proud, so unbelievably proud of her he can’t put it into words.

They have so much rice between them. So much.

He swears Debbie’s tearing up a bit when he finishes his story, and he’s not quite sure what to do next. He’s holding the damn bag of rice like it’s an infant, and he feels a bit lost in the wide expanse of the aisle. 

“Come with me,” Debbie says, grabbing at his arm and pulling him with her. “I’ve got just the thing.”

Ten minutes and one confused cashier later, Scott’s driving back to his apartment with a white metal bucket in the passenger seat of his truck. It’s got silver trim, and it’s ridged slightly on the edges. He thinks it’s very Tessa, clean and simple and classic.

He has to stop himself after a few adjectives, because _seriously Moir, that’s a_ bucket _you’re waxing poetic about._

When he gets home, he sits down at his kitchen table with the rice, the bucket and an unopened pack of blank cards. He absentmindedly thinks Kate Virtue might’ve bought him those once, being her usual self, and he’s suddenly grateful for her obsession with stationery. (Tessa shares it too, and he swears he’ll never understand why some notebooks and pens are supposedly _far superior_ to others.)

He takes his time with the note, makes sure to print it in his neatest handwriting, taking care to follow all the proper rules of English grammar (those that he remembers, at least).

When he’s done, he seals up the envelope and writes “ _T”_ on the outside. He hasn’t called her Tessa in a while now, she’s _T_ or _Tess_ or _Kiddo_ to him (and sometimes _Tutu_ , when he feels like teasing her).

He dumps the rice into the bucket, makes sure to cut off the tag, and places the note _just so_.

_Look at how much rice we have, kiddo._

_We have so much training behind us, we’re ready for this._

_Love, Scott._

Satisfied, he loads the whole thing back into the passenger seat, straps it in, and drives the short distance to Tessa’s house. 

When he gets to her driveway, he can’t help but feel kind of strange, like he’s essentially about to ding-dong-ditch her with a bucket of grain, but he sucks it up, places the bucket down, rings her doorbell and runs. 

He parked a few blocks away, knows his truck would be a dead giveaway to his presence, so he ducks behind her neighbour’s garage so he can watch her door. It’s probably incredibly creepy, to be spying on your skating partner from a property away, but he can’t help it. He wants to see her open the door.

She does a few seconds later, looks around to see who’s there. Her gaze drops to the bucket, and he can see her hand fly up to cover her mouth. Gingerly, she picks up the card and runs her fingers across the paper. 

He makes his exit just as she tears the envelope open.

On Wednesday, she greets him with a hug so tight he thinks she might crush him, all five-feet-four of her. 

Months later, she tells an interviewer it’s the best gift she’s ever gotten. He realizes belatedly that they filmed the interview on another Tuesday.

**_iii. slip_ **

He knows he shouldn’t be thinking about this anymore. He knows it was one hiccup, one split-second stumble, and she’d pulled him right back into it.

But he’d been out of it all on his own.

The gold medals sit in boxes on the desk in the corner, taunting him from half a room away. It’s like they’re calling him out, saying _you didn’t deserve that, you let her down and she was perfect and you almost fell_. He rolls over in the bed, making sure not to jostle the mattress and wake her up. He can’t look at them, can’t bear to be reminded of their free dance, just hours before.

He’d felt so guilty afterward that he’d repeated the botched section during their introduction at the medal ceremony, because _damn it_ , he was determined to get this right. He was not going to leave the ice in Helsinki without delivering the performance in its entirety — even if it had to be broken up into parts.

He can’t sleep so he stares at the ceiling while those three seconds play on a loop in his mind. He can hear her steady breathing; she’s out like a light, sleep having claimed her long ago.

Deciding the ceiling doesn’t offer much in terms of a view, he gingerly rolls to his side and watches her sleep, her chest rising and falling rhythmically in time with her breaths. Her hair is in a sensible braid, the end of it splayed on the pillow, leaving the top of her back exposed, the strappy camisole she’d worn to bed not doing much work of its own.

He thinks he could look at her like this for hours, when she’s completely at ease, not a care in the world. He could memorize every one of her freckles like they’re a map of her soul, find hidden meanings in the valleys of her curves, write volumes about the pale milky tones of her skin.

He thinks he could spend days listing off the things he loves about her, from her eyes to her brilliant brain to her kindness to her movements, always fluid and sure. He could spend weeks chronicling Tessa Virtue and he still wouldn’t know what small miracle he must’ve performed in a former life to warrant her presence in his. Surely, he once saved a baby or cured a major disease because for some reason, he gets to hold her hand every day and love her and he’s not quite sure how he ended up deserving this.

He’s still not convinced he does.

He let her down today, he nearly fell and the guilt is eating him up inside. 

Tessa told him, right after they finished their free dance, that he didn’t let her down. She told him, after the scores were announced, that she was so proud of him. She reminded him, after the post-win interview, that they just had an undefeated season. And she reassured him, back in their hotel room, that she loves him, does today and will tomorrow and in all the days to come — her words punctuated by countless kisses.

He tries to believe her, really does. He knows she’s not lying. She can’t lie to him. Can’t pity him either. She knows him too well for that.

So she’s giving him space, not physically or emotionally, but space to think through the free dance and mull it over and sulk for a while and come to terms with it.

He knows she won’t bring it up again until he does, will focus on their win and the gala and their flights home to Montreal and preparations as they transition out of the end of the competitive season.

He rolls over again and tries to come up with words. 

It’d be one thing, he thinks, if he could go to her and tell her how he feels about the slip, go to her like he does with almost everything else. But he can’t seem to wrap his tongue around the feeling, can’t articulate it. 

He decides there’s no way he’s sleeping much tonight, so he grabs the stupid hotel notepad and pen from the nightstand and makes his way to the bathroom. It’s a little unorthodox, to be penning notes from the loo, but it’s the only place he can turn on a light without waking Tessa.

He sits down on the closed seat of the toilet and scrubs his hand over his face.

_Tess,_

_It’s three in the morning in Finland and I don’t know why I’m writing this, except to tell you that I love you…_

They skate the gala the next day, and he has a smile on his face again. It’s amazing what a few hours, a tiny bit of sleep and words scribbled on a notepad in the dead of night can do. He didn’t give her the note the next morning; he kissed her awake instead, raking his eyes over her small frame, drinking her in.

He’d shown her in not so many words how much he loves her, cherishes her, needs her.

Then they’d skated, celebrated, packed up and flown home.

It’s Tuesday now, they’re back in Montreal, and he’s making them breakfast. Tessa said she’d join him in a bit, she just wanted to stow their suitcases away in the hall closet.

He’s about to go looking for her — surely this can’t take more than a few minutes — when she steps into the kitchen, tears in her eyes, holding a piece of paper in her hand. It’s the note from Finland, he realizes; he must have left it in a pocket of his suitcase that she checked before putting it away.

She practically launches herself at him; he has to take a step backward to support them and stop from falling over. She clings on to him like he may disappear if she lets go and buries her face in the crook of his neck, holding him desperately, impossibly close. He wraps his arms around her and gets a lungful of strawberries and vanilla and _Tessa_ , until she pulls back to look him in the eye.

“I love you, Scott Moir,” she says, her eyes watery and her voice shaking. “Don’t you ever doubt that, not for one second.”

The kiss she presses to his lips is so bruising that he knows, in that moment, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’s utterly loved.

**_iv. question_ **

Over the course of the past 21 years, Scott has given Tessa countless notes and letters and post-its, lots of them practical, quite a few of them sentimental, and some of them blatant declarations of love.

Some have been more significant than others, sure, taken more time to compose, but he still feels a bit of pride when he writes them for her and sees that they make her smile.

It’s the unexpected ones she loves most — the ones she called “random Tuesday ‘thinking of you’ cards” in an interview the year before — the ones that just remind her that he’s here and he sees her and he loves her.

His next Tuesday note will be his most important one to date. 

He’s bought a new set of cards for it, from the stationery shop downtown he knows she likes so much. They’re crisp and white, with filigree on the front. The envelopes are robin’s egg blue, just as she likes them.

He’s found a type of inky pen that he loves, now that he’s living with a veritable pen-hoarder, and he sneaks one from her home office to use for the note. He spends days writing draft after draft on an old yellow legal pad, makes sure to hide it afterward, after he crosses through lines and words and whole chunks of text.

This has to be perfect.

He settles for a simple script — short and sweet — on Sunday, copies it down diligently, writing out every letter with care. He seals it and tucks it away in the corner of his skate bag, where she’ll never check because she thinks it smells like feet. It keeps a tiny velvet box company for the next two days.

On Tuesday, Scott is finishing up at the rink where he’s helping Marie-France and Patrice with their junior teams, his schedule flexible so he and Tessa can keep touring for a few years. He asked Patch for private ice time tonight, and by the smile on the other man’s lips he thinks his former coach might have figured out what he was up to.

Tessa, however, is oblivious, or so he hopes. He told her to meet him at the rink to help him work through a lift for one of his junior pairs and he’d gotten back a grinning emoji, an ice skate and the boy and girl dancers.

So far, so good.

The rink is clear of skaters now, so Scott makes his way to centre ice and drops the letter down. (He tested this part days ago, and knows for certain that the envelope won’t melt or bleed because of the ice. He also knows for certain that he got more than one weird look from his skaters when they witnessed the whole thing.)

Satisfied with his envelope placement, he gets off the ice, puts his skate guards back on, and disappears behind the boards where Tessa won’t be able to see him. He told her a few minutes ago that he needed to do something in the office, that she should go ahead and warm up without him, since he’d been on the ice all day.

Now, as he’s in position and waiting, he can’t help but feel very _1998_ , waiting to give a pretty girl his picture, or _2012_ , ding-dong-dashing what Tessa still considers her favourite gift of his. Except it’s 2019, she’s walking into the rink, and the box in his pocket feels like it’s burning into his skin.

He watches her skate to centre ice and stop as she spots the letter, robin’s egg blue in a sea of white, crouch down and pick it up. He waits by the boards as she stands with her back to him, opening up the letter with shaking hands.

_T,_

_Not only have you been my partner on the ice for over two decades, but you’ve been my best friend, my favourite person and my touchstone through it all. I can’t imagine having spent the last 21 years with anyone else by my side. Turn around, I’ve got a surprise waiting for you…_

_All my love,_

_Scott xx_

He’s gliding toward her as she turns, tears streaming down her face. When she sees him, she chokes out a sob. He’s in front of her in an instant, wiping the tears from her eyes, murmuring “don’t cry, baby” in a soothing voice.

She shakes her head no and lets out a laugh. “Happy tears, Scott. So so happy.”

He’s got tears in his own eyes too and he thinks they could probably fill the rink with them at the rate they’re crying. He takes her hands in his and raises them, kissing her knuckles before dropping down on one knee.

If he thought she was crying before, she’s sobbing in earnest now, and he’s probably doing the same.

This has been 21 years in the making, and he can’t help but think it’s kind of perfect that this is happening where it all began.

He pulls out the ring from his pocket — a simple diamond, understated and elegant and _Tessa_ — and clears his throat.

“Hi, T.” She mouths the greeting back at him. “I’ve imagined this moment so many times, in so many ways, but at the end of the day all that matters is that you’re here and I’m here and we love each other. I love you so much that it’s hard to put into words. It defies description, it’s bigger than me, I think. I don’t think there’s a world in which I’m not loving you.”

He clears his throat one more time: this is it.

“Tess, I love you so much, and I’ve been the luckiest man to spend the past two decades by your side. I want to share the next four decades too, at least; will you marry me?”

She starts nodding, slowly, then with more urgency, pulling him up to his feet and into a bruising kiss. She fists her hands in his hair and presses as close as she can.

He melts into her, holds her steady on wobbly skates, and realizes belatedly that she never actually answered. Which is probably something she should do, just so they’re clear and on the same page.

He pulls back, just a hair, tells her that and watches her eyes crinkle. She doing the laugh-cry thing again and he’s such a lucky bastard, especially when she whispers “yes, Scott, a thousand times yes” in his ear.

Three months later, they send out their wedding invitations.

The cards are crisp and white, with filigree at the front; the envelopes are robin’s egg blue.

There is plenty of rice thrown after their wedding ceremony.

The ‘thank you' notes include pictures of them both, and they're written in her loopy cursive, in inky black pen.

And yes, some of them are written in a hotel room at three in the morning, but this time, they’re wrapped up in bed _together_. He dictates, she writes.

It’s three hours into the start of a Tuesday.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this!
> 
> Feel free to yell at me here, in the comments, or on Tumblr (good-things-come-in-threes) or Twitter (_bucketofrice).


End file.
